• Doctoral Dissertation Project: Cross-dialectal tone perception and processing

During speech comprehension, multiple lexical items that have sound patterns consistent with the auditory input are activated in people’s minds. For bilingual speakers, this activation is language non-selective, which means similar-sounding words in both languages compete for selection. Nonetheless, bilingual speakers can discern fine-grained acoustic differences between their two languages and use language-specific acoustic cues to resolve cross-language lexical competition at the earliest stages of lexical processing. While the operation of this mechanism in bilinguals is well-documented, it remains unclear whether similar mechanisms underlie speech comprehension of bidialectal speakers, who are conventionally considered to be monolinguals. In addition, speech processing research has focused on the interlingual perception of consonants and vowels but has yet to leverage the unique case of interaction of multiple tonal systems, even though more than half of all world languages are tonal. To address these research gaps, this project examines an understudied population of tonal bidialectal speakers and investigates cross-dialectal competition in spoken language processing.

Supervised by Dr. Christine Shea, Dr. Bob McMurray, Dr. Jie Zhang, and Dr. Ethan Kutlu

• The acquisition of relative pronouns: A bi-directional study of learners of Spanish and English

We are currently recruiting (i) native English speakers or native-Spanish English learners, and (ii) native Spanish speakers or native-English Spanish learners to participate in an online study. Please click the embedded links for more information if interested in participating.

In collaboration with Dr. Becky Gonzalez and Katherine Will

• The effects of phonology on language-switching in auditory comprehension among bidialectal speakers

Previous research on bilingual language control has revealed a switch cost when bilingual speakers switch between different linguistic systems. The current study investigates the effects of phonological similarity on bilingual language switch costs in auditory comprehension. Participants are bidialectal speakers from China, where Standard Mandarin is used in formal contexts while each region has at least one local dialect, with varying degrees of phonological similarity to Standard Mandarin.

• Facilitative use of grammatical gender in heritage bilinguals with two gender systems

Work on gender congruency effects shows that gender representation is shared across languages of the bilingual, and gender values from both languages are accessible during real-time processing. At the same time, studies on heritage speakers of languages with grammatical gender consistently observe non-target-like production and comprehension of gender. This project uses eye-tracking technology to investigate whether heritage speakers of Spanish whose dominant language (German) also has gender can access and deploy gender in the heritage language (Spanish) in real-time.

In collaboration with Dr. Zuzanna Fuchs

• Individual variances of L1 category boundary perception in L2 phonological acquisition

In collaboration with Dr. Christine Shea and Onae Parker